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User blog:Helanhalvan/Helanhalvan's Guide to Superfriends
__NOEDITSECTION__Hi, I have made some earlier posts to help new players get a better hold of Magic: The Gathering as a game, mostly focusing on deckbuilding. This time I decided to talk a little bit about an Archetype that's quite big in the rank 30+ meta of Magic Duels. =What is Superfriends?= Superfriends is not a deck, it's an archetype, and there are more than a few decks in it. The main idea of Superfriends is that you have planewalkers and board removal, and lots of both. How Superfriends work The main power of Superfriends comes from the fact that planewalkers can only really be dealt with effectively by creatures, and the mass removal can kill all creatures allowing your planewalkers to generate a lot of card advantage. This means that there are two main ways for Superfriends to gain card advantage. One is to kill a lot of creatures with one mass removal. The other is to allow a planewalker to stay in the game for a long time. Other than that most Superfriends decks also run good cards and play them, but this is what makes it special. =Main weaknesses of Superfriends= Superfriends is a powerful deck, but not without flaws. The main thing when playing against it is that it's very hard to both be able to kill planewalkers they play, and still not lose to much to mass removal. In standard helanhalvan fashion, lets break down aspects that are important. Mana base Because Superfriends requires to have access to at bunch of planeswalkers, and you can only play one of each, and there are not that many, Superfriends will play at least 3 colors. This is one of the things that makes the deck worse than it normally would be. It slows the deck down, as it runs a lot of dual lands that enter the battlefield tapped. Also, it makes the deck get some more bad hands and have more mana issues then two color decks. There is not much to do in order to exploit this weakness, land destruction and hand disruption (discard spells), can probably hurt superfriends quite a bit. However, there are not a ton of good cards like that to form a deck, that are generally powerful, at least not to my knowledge (there is some black based hand distribution deck that I have met sometimes, but never played). Also, because of the number of good dual lands available in Magic Duels the mana base is not that bad. Few power cards While the Superfriends deck tries to run as many planewalkers and mass removals as possible. Because of the limits of the Magic Duels card pool it's still not that many cards. This means that the deck can run out of planewalkers, at least in hand, and if they do, it is very hard for them to get back into the game, as they need the planewalkers to generate their advantage. Some decks have ways of getting dead planewalkers back into their hand, stopping that from happening if at all possible is really important. Also, there are not that many mass removal spells available either, keeping track of how many they have used and which ones they can play is a very good idea. It is important to recognize that Superfriends usually play some cards to find more planewalkers and mass removal in their decks. This can offset the problem for most of the game, at the cost of some mana. However, spending some extra mana leads into the big issue. Slow This deck is quite slow at doing everything. Because of the 3+ colors mana base, it will be a bit slower, just by having tapped lands. Because it runs planeswalkers as a win condition, it will not have as many scary creatures as most decks, so threatening your life total is not that easy for them. Because the deck is slow, being aggressive is a good idea, however, playing a "normal" aggro deck is not necessarily the answer. The game-plan for a lot of normal aggro decks is to play all cards in their hand and attack a lot. The issue with this, is that a single mass removal will be game ending. =Types of decks that can beat superfriends= With these observations in mind, lets look at types of decks that can beat superfriends, and why they can do it. Mill Mill decks are the decks that empty your opponents library and win by having them not being able to draw a card from their deck. For the typical mill deck, you don't have a lot of creatures, which is both good and bad. It makes it more difficult to deal with planewalkers, but also means that mass removal is not a big concern. Also, a lot of planeswalkers' +1 abilities are "draw a card", so leaving them around is bad, but also helps forward your plan for emptying their library. Another side effect of having a lot of planeswalkers, is that you're not likely to take a lot of damage from creatures, as they will usually want to get rid of planeswalkers first. This means that it takes a surprising amount of creature attack power to really win against a Superfriends deck. Mill does not really care about that effect. In addition, the way to beat Mill is to kill them before they kill you, and that can be rather difficult for sSuperfriends. Clues/Thopters/Chairs One way of dealing with Superfriends is to play a creature-heavy deck, and make sure you can still recover from mass removal. There are a few good enchantments that can really help with this. Some examples are: , , . Only a madman would run all of them in the same deck (I'll post my deck tech later). The main idea is that you play a bunch of stuff on the board, to force them to use their mass removal, and then you get more stuff out. While the Superfriends deck might run some enchantment removal, they probably don't run a lot of them. Also, if they have to play that, to get rid of for example a Ulvenwald Mysteries, which gives you one more turn of bashing that face. This is a very wide range of decks, and all of them won't be great. Two more enchantments that are important to mention are and . Both of these cards helps to deal with planeswalkers. The Grid can deal damage to them—even if there are no creatures in play, and Bonds simply makes one of them unable to do anything. Don't let them do it! One way to stop Superfriends from working is to counter their spells. Remember that they only have a relatively low amount of super-powerful cards. So, stopping only a few cards from resolving will be a major setback for a Superfriends deck. So, packing a ton of countermagic is a good idea. From here, there are many ways to go. Personally I have had success with a creature-heavy deck that keeps mana up to stop their mass removals: helanhalvan's Pacifists with Swords Another option is to play a deck that has a lot of instant-speed effects. That way, you will always be ready to counter their problem cards, and still always be able to spend your mana doing something. and some more Spirits—among a number of other things—can accomplish this. =The End?= So, this is my take on the ways to win against Superfriends. Remember that it's still a good deck, so it's not like you're going to get a 95% win rate against it—no matter what you do. Also, there are a lot of different versions of the deck, with different properties. Category:Blog posts